You’ve probably heard about how polluted our planet is getting with plain old garbage. Landfills are filling up around the planet and some cities actually truck their garbage to different towns. Plastics bags are ending up in oceans and being swallowed by whales and other marine animals, ultimately killing them. Earth’s garbage problem is so bad in fact that we’re not just leaving our junk all over our own planet, we’re leaving it in outer space as well. No joke! It turns out that the moon is a real dumping ground for all sorts of space exploration vehicles, vehicles that visited the moon in the past. Some of this trash is also made up of moon orbiting satellites that orbited the moon and eventually fell to the surface. 

Orbiting moon crafts don’t burn up when they fall to the moon’s surface, as they would on Earth. Why not? Because the moon has no atmosphere. Objects burn up when they enter the atmosphere because they slow down in the thicker gases (having left the vacuum of space). When they slow down, the friction, which occurs when the falling object and the gases rub against each other, causes heat. Since there is no atmosphere on the moon, all our space junk is just lying there and possibly could be for billions of years. That is unless we clean up this lunar landfill, or a passing alien ship picks up a satellite as a souvenir! This year four more moon satellites are being launched from Planet Earth. The knowledge they send home will tell us a lot about the moon. But when the missions are over, there’s one thing we’ll know without receiving a satellite transmission… there will be four more pieces of moon junk that need to be cleaned up!